"Mission to Paris" is the 12th of his enormously successful historical spy novels, and one of the best. Its protagonist, the Austrian-born American actor Fredric Stahl, is, like most of Furst's heroes, in his early 40s, stoic, resourceful, quietly sympathetic. In his films Stahl plays "a warm man in a cold world." And he has come to Paris in the autumn of 1938 not on a mission but simply to make a movie. Soon enough, though, as the wheels and gears of the plot engage, he stumbles into the clutches of Nazi conspirators who want to exploit his celebrity for pro-¬German propaganda.